Easter Sermon

In the struggle between light and dark, I'm not sure light should win.

I don't mean good and evil here; I don't believe in that dichotomy much.  I mean that the Easter holiday often infects me with vertigo and a little sugar sickness: all those pastels, the flowers, the eggs, the good news.  It's so all so nauseatingly chipper.  So loud.  So light.  So much levity.  

That sounds worse than I maybe really feel.  Things I do love about Easter: big hats on old women, little girls in patent leather shoes, the blessed weather.  

Let me back up.

Let me talk about good news.

All about town the marquis reads "He is Risen!" and the blossoms bloom so bright they quiver from their very roots.  From the megaphone of the Internet, joyful headlines and status updates and photos of purple baskets stuffed to the gills with chocolate malt balls, plastic eggs, and fat bunnies abound.  

These things tell us we have something to celebrate, an exuberant thing, a happy thing.   

Perhaps.  But in the Easter story, I am more moved by death than life, by the story's no-nonsense acknowledgment of suffering more than its assurance of Christ's resurrection as our salvation.  I'm bothered actually by the dichotomy he/we in "He died for our sins," since the Easter story, to me, is nothing if not a mirror held up to the world, a kind of cosmic looking glass.   If they insist on cheer, I  wish the signs read "We are Risen!"   

I am drawn to the darkness.  The quiet consolations.  The crepuscular.  I love the Stations of the Cross, for example.  

The two most reassuring moments in the Easter story for me are somber moments:

1. The moment in the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus cries out from the deepest dark of his pain on the cross,"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?", translated in English as "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Mark is the only gospel that includes this quote from Jesus, so who knows about its veracity, but I am less interested in factual truth than story-truth, in particular truth than universal truth.  In the contest of authorship, Mark wins.  His story has Jesus ask the ultimate question of all sufferers--why am I alone?--and in voicing our most human fear, Jesus assures us we are not alone.  He is with us in our suffering.   

This moment of all Biblical moments is a sublime example of empathy.  One definition of empathy is the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.  The best stories allow our subjective suffering to infuse others; or conversely, to see others as infused with our own grief.  My subjective suffering infused into the body of Jesus so that he feels what I feel.  Stories, then, become the great equalizer, as death is too.  

I do not need Jesus to save me from sin, so I much as I need a presence bigger than myself to sit with me in my darknesses.  The best stories do not entertain us or cheer us up so much as console us, and consolation does not come in pastels, at least not for me.

2.  If stories console us, then they behave as salves.  The other Easter moment I love--a moment documented by all four gospel stories--is the moment after Jesus' death when a man named Joseph of Arimathea bravely asks Pontius Pilate for the body of Jesus.  Joseph wraps the body in linen and carries it to the tomb.  Outside the tomb, women sit and pay witness.  

That we may all have someone dress our wounds, tend to our bodies when they're most frail.  May we all have someone watch, listen, witness, and mourn, a woman or two to say "I see what has happened to you. I hear you.  I see you."

The best stories sit with us in the pitch of night before the dawn.  They are soul-salves, wrapped around our broken spirits like Joseph's linen cloths around the dead body of Christ.  

Once in my youth I went to a Sarah McLachlan concert--laugh if you want.   I'm showing my age and my ridiculousness.  I was 18, suffused with sorrow and confusion, and I remember she said on stage, "I try to write happy songs, but it never works.  The sadder the song, the better I feel."

I just finished reading Joe Landsdale's excellent, deeply gothic mystery novel, "The Bottoms."  At the end, the main character Harry, looking back on his life, says, "Life's like that.  It isn't like one of Grandma's murder mysteries.  Everything doesn't get sewn up neatly."

I don't know why we want to sugarcoat everything, literally and figuratively.  I want the messiness before we sew everything up neatly, before the resurrection.  We need to celebrate darkness too, because then we'll feel less alone when we find ourselves incapable of joy, we'll feel less defective, less like failures.  We'll feel consoled.  If that's not good news, then I don't know what.

Happy Easter.

Amen.

In honor of darkness and empathy, here are a few very dark, very satisfying pieces of art I'm drawn to lately if anyone wants to feel better:

Sermon in Favor of Looking Evil in His Ugly Face

On Wednesday night I jogged past to see for myself: the small Heights bungalow a mere four blocks from my home where, sometime between 1971 and 1973, serial killer Dean Corll and his teenage accomplices raped, tortured, and murdered boys from the Heights.  The boys killed in this particular house were not the first or last of Corll's 27 known victims--a record number that anointed him the worst serial killer in U.S. history until the more infamous John Wayne Gacy, who admittedly "imitated" Corll, beat him with at least 30 victims.

The current owners must have children, because their Christmas decorations--LED lights in brown lunch bags and happy snowmen--whisper of craft time around the dining room table.  The house warmly glows in the dusk, a direct counter to the sudden chill that creeps up my bare arms.  Do they know?, I wonder.  They couldn't possibly know, I think, and still have bought that house.

As I pick up my jog again and head home, I wish I didn't know either.

But I do know.  I want to know.  I was dying to know.  Everything.  Every last detail.  So I've read articles, I've read true crime books, I've driven to each locale.  I'm doing research for my own writing, I tell myself, a half-truth.  And anyway, it's my neighborhood.  Shouldn't I know its history down to even the deepest, darkest secrets?

The real truth is both less noble and more spiritual than my little justifications.  I've always read true crime books, mystery novels, detective stories.  When I was a voracious adolescent reader, I picked up whatever my parents left lying around the house, and some of those books detailed sinister crimes.  My mother, an anatomy teacher and would-be forensic pathologist (she was taking a course, I remember, called "Blood Splatter Patterns and Entry Wounds" and often left the house reminding us in a casual voice that she would see us after she "worked on the cadavers") unwittingly fed my interest in history's notorious and lesser known psychopaths.  And Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for his depiction of Hannibal Lector right smack dab in the middle of my most formative years.  In my adulthood, I've seen every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, all fourteen seasons worth.  Twice.  That's 654 hours of television.  I'm now watching them a third time with my husband.

Why the fascination with such evil?

It wasn't a fetish--I didn't much enjoy how I felt when I read those horror stories.  Nor did I want to emulate the sadism of the killers, the ineptitude of bystanders and police, or the haplessness and grief of the victims' families and communities.  No thank you on all three counts.  But I did--and do--want to know.

Tonight, while I cook turkey chili, my husband picks up Jack Olsen's The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders and turns it face down on the kitchen counter.  He doesn't like the cover photos, old black and whites of the Candyman himself--they give him a serious case of the heebie jeebies.  Let me read to you while you cook, he says, and thumbs through Best American Spiritual Writing 2012, hoping, perhaps to undo any bad juju I've invited into our home with my latest obsession.  Without realizing it, he starts reading from Terry Eagleton's "The Nature of Evil", first published in Tikkun.  How apropos.

I am struck immediately by these lines:

It is only by identifying with this polluted, cast-out thing (which in early sacrifice usually involed eating it) that the city can be saved, that which is torn and bleeding can be made whole, justice can be accomplished, and life can be snatched from the jaws of death.

Eagleton's saying we have to ingest it--the nothingness, the evil--to escape it.  If we merely try to block it out or recast it as a funny zombie, say, or sparkly vampire, we've still not looked the thing in its naked, horrid face.  Olsen writes about Houston, "Violence is as much a part of the city's heritage as the post oaks and the bayous."  Isn't the same true about the heritage of all human beings?

I don't know.  I've always preferred an acknowledgment of violence, even in my churches. Much of what keeps me "Catholic" is my body.  I love the physicality of the mass (all that genuflecting, and call and response, so that all the bodies and voices become one body, one voice, so that even if you don’t go to mass for years, your body will still know what to do), the physicality of the sacraments—the Eucharist, the anointing of the sick, the word anoint coming from the Latin “to smear or rub”, and the violent physicality of the churches themselves, the holy water, bloody crucifixes and the heady incense and candle smells.  To me, Catholic churches are bodies, mysterious and grotesque and elaborate.  And violent.  So many other churches smell like bleach. 

More importantly for me, I feel like the more I know about evil, its various facades in the mortal world, the more I admit it exists and ingest the reality of "bad things", the more I know I can't control it.  There is no panacea for this, the hard fact of which scares the crap out of me, but also relieves me of an inexplicable burden.  The more darkness I ingest, the lighter I feel (of course, you can overeat too).  If I can't erase the darkness, then my job becomes simply to walk toward the light with all my might, dragging as many people as I can with me.  That's a wholly different and, in some ways, less arduous task from pretending the darkness isn't there. 

I remember standing outside that yellow house on Wednesday night, a house I expected to bulge and brim with its own crepuscular history, and how it shined from within at me—its brown bag lanterns and fairy lights flickering like little armored warriors that stand guard against the descending night.  

Amen.

Dean Corll